Suite au message de "julien piaser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> intitul�
[[devel] what to do?], du Wed, 18 Aug 1999 14:23:27 GMT:
| I'm part of the Belfort-Montbeliard Technology University (North East of
| France). As we plan to fund a Linux Association in our university, we are
| looking for some work to do.
Good news : there is a lot of work that awaits you! =)
| As most of us will become computer engineers, we want to participate to a
| Linux project. In fact, we don't know yet what are the actual needs, and who
| to contact.
In fact, I don't think that there is someone to contact directly,
since almost everything is open-sourced, as you know. This means that
nobody will prevent you to work.
What I would suggest at first is to subscribe to a mailing list of
developpers. There are well organized projects, such as GNOME
(http://www.gnome.org) or KDE (http://www.kde.org), where getting
implied is quite easy (read the info on those sites about where help
is needed). Browse their CVS server, check how things are done, get
used to the particular program that you like the most. Take a look at
the bugs list and correct some, by sending your patches to the
maintainers of the program. If you feel good, you can also make some
improvements like those that wait in the wishlists (ask before on the
mailing-list if the feature is accepted by the other people, what is
good for you is not necessarily good for everyone). If you proove to
be good for the project, you'll probably be given write access to the
CVS. You'll then be able to add new features and correct bugs directly
in the sources of the program. There, if you make good work, you'll be
respected by your peers, which is quite pleasant.
Since you are many programmers, you might prefer to code a new program
from scratch, but this is not the philosophy of the free software
movement. It is usually more valuable to take some existing code and
improove it : that's why "embrace and extend" is one of the motto.
Good luck!
Gregus
